We lost a graphics card and then mother board on our pointools machine. After quite a lot of back and forth with Bentley, we were able to get it loaded on the new laptop with much more computing and graphics power. Unfortunately, even with the Codec updates suggested by Bentley, the software cannot finish one flythrough. Does anyone have any suggestions? or an alternative software for building a point cloud fly through.

I can't specifically help you with your Pointools issue.. however we've welcomed a lot of ex-Pointools users to our software and we'd be more than happy to help you make some great fly through videos in our software!

You can get a 14 day trial to play with from our website (www.veesus.com) and talk to us directly either here or via email/Skype. We're here to help.

I've encountered that problem numerous times and the solution (for me at least) is to make sure that you render both images and AVI (or MOV) at the same time. For whatever reason this seems to fix it. This solution was given to me by Bentley a long time ago so it's obviously a workaround they are aware of.

At the very least you have the still frames to merge into an animation later anyway using TimeLapse or similar whereas the AVI will generally just die when it crashes. Just restart your render at the last completed frame +1 and you'll be good. But it should fix the issue anyway - it worked on our 120gb POD file.

Another tip - make sure you don't have any unapplied edits in the queue. Export your project to a new POD and re-import that POD back into your project (replacing the edited one). Then clear all the history. Never do rendering with an edit queue.

I only know Pointools pre-Connect edition, so those problems might have been fixed in later versions - we didn't bother paying for maintenance when there weren't any new version coming out with any regularity.

I am using 1.8 I believe.
Honestly no software these days should be this difficult to use. I should receive a patch that fixes the bugs, not a link to wikipedia with half baked explanations of how someone else figured out how to make their software that I spent thousands of dollars on to work.
Arena4D has been very accommodating, they will likely get our business.

Pointools 1.8 is very very old so you can't expect it to be perfect. I think it was the version that was current back when Bentley first acquired Pointools, so they hadn't really even done any work on, except maybe rebranding it. 1.8 was also not 64 bit from memory (which the later version are), so that's a pretty big limitation.

The later versions fixed a LOT of the issues with the early one (from memory the move to V8i patched upwards of 200 bugs).

I agree with you that it's an odd program in terms of usability, but its rendering is hard to beat when it works. It's a bit of a dead end anyway since Bentley kind of abandoned it - so I think most people (except me) have moved on from it to packages that actually get updated. I'll be interested to see how you find Veesus by comparison.

Pointools 1.8 is very very old so you can't expect it to be perfect. I think it was the version that was current back when Bentley first acquired Pointools, so they hadn't really even done any work on, except maybe rebranding it. 1.8 was also not 64 bit from memory (which the later version are), so that's a pretty big limitation.

You are exactly right. When we got the program there was literally no one that could get us the credentials to load it on our original machine because of the buy out.
While I would love to stay with them and upgrade, the last cost we got from them was outrageous.